By a Spider's Thread: A Tess Monaghan Novel Read Online Free

lot of time on the Internet?” A new wrinkle in divorce cases, stealth adultery, which didn’t reveal itself until the person ran off to be with his or her virtual love. Installing spyware was one of Tess’s first steps in any case where a spouse suspected another spouse of fooling around.
    “She barely knows how to use a computer. Our oldest son had to set up her e-mail account.”
    “And there was no” — she took a breath and plunged ahead — “no violence in the household?”
    “No.”
Here, at least, he was utterly convincing.
    “It’s just that it’s very unusual for a woman to up and leave, taking her three children. Does she have a job?”
    “No matter my circumstances, I would never allow — I mean, I would never expect my wife to work outside the home.”
    “Then how would she support them? Does she have her own money? Family?”
    A slight hesitation here. “Not one that she can rely on. Her mother is still here in Baltimore, but she and Natalie have been estranged since her parents’ divorce, back when she was a young teenager. Her father’s completely out of the picture now, has no contact with her at all.”
    Tess wondered if Rubin’s marriage had been an arranged one, then wondered if the Orthodox still used arranged marriages. Her upbringing had been bicultural primarily in the culinary details. The Weinsteins went out for Chinese and held backyard crab feasts, rationalizing that anything eaten outside wasn’t really
treyf
. The Monaghans had lesser palates, but they loved the Sour Beef dinner put on by the ladies of Good Counsel every autumn. On St. Patrick’s Day, they drove for lean corned beef to what Tess’s paternal grandfather called Jewtown. Pop-Pop Monaghan had called the neighborhood that to the day he died, literally. In his bed in the old house on Wilkens Avenue, he had reached for Tess’s hand, mistaking her for his only daughter, Kitty, the youngest and best loved of his seven children.
    “Well,” he had said, “Patrick married a Jew. What do you know about that, Kitty? A Jewess from Jewtown.”
    There was no meanness in his tone, no censure. He was just calling a spade a spade, a Jew a Jewess. As for Jewtown — well, that designation had appeared on some local maps well into the 1930s, and Pop-Pop Monaghan’s worldview had pretty much jelled by then.
    “I know,” Tess had replied, trying to find something that would be neither rebuke nor agreement, “that he loves her.”
    “Love,” her grandfather scoffed.
    Some men might have been smart enough to exit on a line like that, but Brian Monaghan, a belligerent Irishman to the end, wore out his welcome, coming back from death several times in that last day. Finally life seemed to tire of
him
and shuttered itself against his return, like a tavern giving someone the bum’s rush.
    But her Monaghan side was of no use here. Today Tess needed to rely on her Weinstein genes if she was going to find any affinity with this prickly man who clearly had the wherewithal to help her out of her financial slump.
    “Do you have any leads at all? A vehicle, a name she might use, a place, a friend she might reach out to, a list of long-distance phone calls from before she left?”
    “All our cars are in our garage, untouched. My guess is she’d revert to her maiden name, or some form of it. Natalie Peters.” Tess idly wondered what the surname was before it was changed. Her grandfather had been too stubborn to consider such a thing, and he was proud of having the Weinstein name on his stores until the day they sank into bankruptcy. “As for family or friends, it’s only her mother, and, as I said, they have no relationship. I think she lives up on Labyrinth Road. Vera Peters.”
    “Still, it’s a place to start. Now, has Natalie drawn on any accounts — checking or savings — since she’s been gone? Used a credit card?”
    “No, nothing like that.”
    “And the police didn’t find that suspicious? That’s usually a sign